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Garrett Murray lives here. He's the senior developer at Blue Flavor by day and an amateur writer and comedian by night. You can read more about him or
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I've been having this problem lately and hopefully one of you can help: I have my MacBook Pro hooked up to my Cinema Display for most of the day when I work. I use the CD as the primary display and the MBP becomes the secondary. Occasionally, however, I want to leave my little office and venture into the living room or—gasp!—outside.

The issue is that when I unplug the CD, the MBP display goes back to being the primary... which is fine, except that the MBP's screen has a smaller resolution, so all the windows hang off the screen. I have to spend a few minutes just dragging windows back into normal places, resizing things to fit again, et cetera.

Especially annoying are things like the iChat buddy list, which I keep in the upper-right corner of the secondary display... it moves to the middle of the primary, Twitterific (which I also keep in a corner) and other panels also get completely displaced.

Is there any utility that can solve this problem? Ideally, the app would just move everything in from the outer edge by the amount of pixel difference between the two displays. If my buddy list was 50px from the edges of the secondary, it should be in the same place on the primary after the unplug.

If anyone knows how to get around this problem, I'm all ears (or eyes, in this case): garrett at maniacalrage dot net.

Tags: help, osx, software, stupid Hierarchy: previous, next